Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Media, such as video and audio, is often compressed to reduce the quantity of data needed to represent the media (commonly known as the bit rate). By reducing the bit rate, a smaller amount of data storage may be needed to store the video and less bandwidth may be needed to transmit the video over a network. Numerous video codecs (coder/decoders) exist as hardware and/or software components that enable compression or decompression of digital video. To decode compressed video, many types of computing systems have hardware and/or software decoding units.
Decoding video can be a CPU-intensive task, especially for higher resolutions like 1080p. Therefore, while video decoders may be implemented as software modules that execute on general purpose processors, in many circumstances, specialized hardware decoders may be more efficient and/or more capable, especially with regards to decoding higher-resolution video. Some low-power devices, such mobile computing systems, may be equipped with general purpose processors that may have difficulty decoding high-resolution video in real-time and/or within an acceptable power envelope. To assist in decoding such videos, some mobile computing systems, such as smartphones and tablets, may be equipped with one or more hardware video decoders configured to decode compressed video.